YALTA

One passage in President Bush's speech in Latvia a week ago has stirred up vigorous debate on both Right and Left. This is the passage:

"For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E Day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end oppression. The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.

I have hesitated to say anything about it so far -- though I have linked to various related statements by others -- because I myself have always had many reservations about Allied actions in BOTH world wars. But it is a huge debate that has been going on for many years now so I will outline my conclusions here without endeavouring to support them other than by suggesting readings that those interested in the subject might look at if they want to follow anything up:

That FDR was either a fool or a rogue in his dealings with Stalin is I think undoubted and I am glad that GWB has come out saying that by implication -- but whether anything FDR could have done would have saved the Baltic States from Stalin is highly dubious. He could however have saved the whole of Germany by unleashing Patton and that could well have saved Poland too.

There has also long been a hangover from wartime propaganda that claims that the war was fought for various worthy objectives -- the defence of democracy etc. I don't think, however, anyone has been much deceived by that. The war was a war of national survival for those threatened by Hitler and for FDR it was a war he was desperate to enter so that he could -- in good Leftist fashion -- exercise power and dominate world politics. He wanted to be at the head of the table at the end of the war. As in World War I however, the American people did not want a bar of intervention in Europe so he had to engineer an attack by the Japanese to get the people onside.

OK. I have probably said too much already. Just to get you thinking, here is an excerpt from a much reproduced comment by Buchanan on the issue:

"If Yalta was a betrayal of small nations as immoral as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, why do we venerate Churchill and FDR? At Yalta, this pair secretly ceded those small nations to Stalin, co-signing a cynical "Declaration on Liberated Europe" that was a monstrous lie. As FDR and Churchill consigned these peoples to a Stalinist hell run by a monster they alternately and affectionately called "Uncle Joe" and "Old Bear," why are they not in the history books alongside Neville Chamberlain, who sold out the Czechs at Munich by handing the Sudetenland over to Germany? At least the Sudeten Germans wanted to be with Germany. No Christian peoples of Europe ever embraced their Soviet captors or Stalinist quislings. Other questions arise. If Britain endured six years of war and hundreds of thousands of dead in a war she declared to defend Polish freedom, and Polish freedom was lost to communism, how can we say Britain won the war? If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?"

There are other good comments by Jeff Jacoby and Geoffrey Wheatcroft and V.D. Hanson. There is a good history of the evolving thinking about the war here and in my view the best balanced account of what did happen and what could have happened is here. And I cannot resist putting up the following excerpt from the Wheatcroft article:

"The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side".

*******************************

ELSEWHERE

Hollywood logic: A UPI Hollywood reporter says: "There is a widely held assumption among many people in the United States -- particularly among conservatives -- that public broadcasting is dominated by liberal politics. But the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy recently reported that Tomlinson has been sitting on polling data showing that a substantial majority of Americans are happy with the programming on PBS and NPR". [How does the report in the second sentence disprove the claim reported in the first sentence? Whether people are happy with it depends on what they expect of it and expectations of balance are probably long gone]

Liberal Avenger is still providing me with entertainment. In response to my admission yesterday that maybe I have an overdeveloped sense of humour, he emailed me as follows: "Maybe you're just a cheap date?". I don't really follow the relevance (if any) of that comment but the abusive intent is clear enough. After I dubbed him "Mr. Hatespeech", his emails to me became polite for a while but he has now obviously reverted to form. He also on one occasion admitted that he is no intellectual. He certainly seems determined to prove it!

Arabs vote with their feet: "Last year as part of discussions about territorial compromise with the Palestinian Authority, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed transferring an area of Arab villages in northern Israel to a new Palestinian state. The proposal would have placed about 200,000 Arab citizens of Israel under Palestinian sovereignty by simply redrawing the internationally recognized, pre-1967 border. Israel would have received in exchange an equivalent geographic area on the West Bank. No one would have moved. The plan simply was a 1-for-1, territorial exchange that put Arabs in Palestine and Jews in Israel. Who could object to such a sensible compromise? The Arab citizens of Israel. "I want to live under the democratic law of Israel, not the law of Arafat," a resident of the village of Muakala told the Jerusalem Post."

I think we have another very holy Pope. Note these of his words: "We have considered the fall of man in general, and the falling of many Christians away from Christ and into a godless secularism. Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in His own Church? How often is the holy sacrament of His Presence abused, how often must He enter empty and evil hearts! How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that He is there! How often is His Word twisted and misused! What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words! How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to Him! How much pride, how much self-complacency! What little respect we pay to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where he waits for us, ready to raise us up whenever we fall! "

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************